Herein, related art is described to facilitate understanding of the invention. Related art labeled “prior art” is admitted prior art; related art not labeled “prior art” is not admitted prior art.
Data center administrators encounter an increasingly diverse set of technologies for realizing compute and data management software solutions. Hardware resources can include stand-alone servers, partitionable complexes, rackmount systems, and blade systems. Each of these systems can be based on different processors and firmware. Furthermore, each of the hardware technologies can support one or more virtualization technologies, including virtual partitions and virtual machines. While it increases the number of tools available to a system administrator, the diversity of technologies seriously complicates the task of a system administrator.
One approach to address this complexity is to insist that all software solutions use a specific virtual-machine technology. However, this limits flexibility as new technologies become available. Also, the requirement that all computers run virtual machines incurs a performance penalty due to virtual-machine hypervisor overhead.